Venezuelans are storming supermarkets and attacking trucks as food supplies dwindle

By Joshua Partlow and Mariana Zuñiga, Washington Post, June 28, 2016:

CARACAS, Venezuela–In the darkness the warehouse looks like any other, a metal-roofed hangar next to a clattering overpass, with homeless people sleeping nearby in the shadows.

But inside, workers quietly unload black plastic crates filled with merchandise so valuable that mobs have looted delivery vehicles, shot up the windshields of trucks and hurled a rock into one driver’s eye. Soldiers and police milling around the loading depots give this neighborhood the feel of a military garrison.

“It’s just cheese,” said Juan Urrea, a 29-year-old driver, as workers unloaded thousands of pounds of white Venezuelan queso from his delivery truck. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

The fight for food has begun in Venezuela. On any day, in cities across this increasingly desperate nation, crowds form to sack supermarkets. Protesters take to the streets to decry the skyrocketing prices and dwindling supplies of basic goods. The wealthy improvise, some shopping online for food that arrives from Miami. Middle-class families make do with less: coffee without milk, sardines instead of beef, two daily meals instead of three. The poor are stripping mangoes off the trees and struggling to survive.

“This is savagery,” said Pedro Zaraza, a car oil salesman, who watched a mob mass on Friday outside a supermarket, where it was eventually dispersed by the army. “The authorities are losing their grip.”

What has been a slow-motion crisis in Venezuela seems to be careening into a new, more dangerous phase. The long economic decline of the country with the world’s largest oil reserves now shows signs of morphing into a humanitarian emergency, with government mismanagement and low petroleum prices leading to widespread shortages and inflation that could surpass 700 percent this year.

The political stakes are mounting. Exhausted by government-imposed power blackouts, spiraling crime, endless food lines, shortages of medicine and waves of looting and protest, citizens are mobilizing against their leaders. In recent days, Venezuelans lined up to add their names to a recall petition that aims to bring down the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, and put an end to the socialist-inspired “revolution” ignited 17 years ago by Hugo Chavez.

“This can’t continue,” said Angel Rondon, a mechanic, who now sometimes eats just once a day. “Things have to change.”

The rumor spread quickly on a recent Tuesday evening in the poor farmlands near Barlovento an hour east of Caracas: A truck carrying rice had tipped over and food was free for the taking. Glenis Sira, a mother of seven, grabbed a plastic bag and ran from her cinder block shack. More than 1,000 people joined her in scrambling to reach the village of La Fundacion before they realized there was no rice truck, only rumor.

“We have never had this level of need,” said Sira, one of several witnesses who described the melee.

For decades Venezuela was one of Latin America’s more stable and developed democracies, with a middle class accustomed to the benefits of oil wealth. Economic crises in the 1980s and 1990s battered many Venezuelan families. But the Chavez era was marked by rising oil prices and declining poverty, leaving few people prepared for the sickening free-fall of the last few years.

Sira has long been a proud “Chavista,” convinced that government spending could create a more equal society. Chavez’s government, flush with oil money and billions of dollars in foreign loans, gave her the Madre de Barrio subsidy for mothers in extreme poverty. Another program helped residents to finish houses under construction. Youths from her community received scholarships.

“I always lived for the revolution,” she said.

But many of the welfare programs started by Chavez have dried up, and the nearest store has little more than two-liter bottles of Pepsi and packs of Pall Mall cigarettes. Under Chavez, the government established a network of government-run supermarkets that sold basic foods at subsidized prices. But inflation has put even these bargains out of reach for many people. A single kilogram of yucca–about two pounds–now costs about one-third of the weekly minimum wage.

Sira’s neighbors hunt for deer and armadillos for subsistence and barter their meager catch. She lives off what she can grow–yams, tomatoes, corn–or what she can forage. Once a cacao-producing region, the area has been devastated by drought.

“I’m a Chavista and damn it, this situation is hard,” she said. “That is why the revolution is being killed. Because we are hungry.”

Venezuela’s ability to produce food and other goods has dwindled over the years as the government has expropriated private companies, expanded price controls, and otherwise discouraged private production. Corn, rice and other foods once grown domestically now have to be imported.

In the past two years, oil prices have dropped by half to below $50 per barrel, the economy has contracted severely, and imports have grown more unaffordable. Private companies have shut down for lack of access to government-controlled dollars to pay for raw materials. The government has so far prioritized making debt payments to avoid default while cutting back on imported products, including food. In recent days, airlines such as Lufthansa, LATAM, and Aeromexico have stopped flying to Venezuela, as the strict currency controls made it difficult for them to be paid in full.

About 87 percent of people say they don’t have enough money to buy food, according to a recent study by Simon Bolivar University.

“We have not yet seen the climax of the crisis,” said Luis Vicente Leon, director of the polling firm Datanalisis, who estimated that retail food outlets in Caracas lack about 80 to 85 percent of their usual products. “Supplies have deteriorated to a very significant degree and it’s probable that things will continue to get worse.”

This year, Maduro decreed that food distribution would be placed under the control of thousands of local citizen committees that critics say are biased toward government supporters. That meant subsidized food would be diverted from the poorly stocked government-run supermarkets.

Over the first five months of this year, Venezuelans have violently looted businesses–or tried to do so–at least 254 times, according to the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict. The number of protests over food has risen each month this year, to 172 in May. Several people have died and hundreds more have been arrested in incidents of unrest across the country.

Maduro’s administration has blamed the incidents on an “economic war” led by foreigners and private businessmen who, it claims, are hoarding food supplies to destabilize the government.

“There is no humanitarian crisis,” Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez told an Organization of American States meeting last week .

Transporting the nation’s food means running a gantlet of need. On June 20, hundreds of protesters blocked a highway in an area called El Guapo, east of Caracas, paralyzing dozens of delivery trucks. During the day-long standoff, driver Jonathan Narvaes, 32, watched as residents ransacked trucks carrying flour and pasta. Soldiers used tear gas to disperse the crowds.

“My boss wants me to try again,” Narvaes said. “I told him, ’Boss, they almost killed me on Monday.’”

Drivers unloading cheese in Caracas, after a 15-hour journey from near the country’s western border with Colombia, said that trucks have been shot at and battered with rocks and that they must pay bribes in money or cheese to military checkpoints along the way.

“Similar situations are happening in almost the whole country,” said Alfredo Sanchez, the head driver of a delivery company called Paisa.

A driver who gave his name as Tony, with the Lacteos La Guanota company, said that when he drove through north-central Aragua state one recent day, protesters surrounded trucks and hauled away the cargo of pigs and chickens.

“I was very afraid,” he said.

Some wealthier consumers have resorted to having food shipped to Venezuela. Soraya Cedillo, the owner of a courier company, said that 70 percent of her customers are Venezuelans living in the United States buying products such as corn flour, sugar, powdered milk, toilet paper and tampons for relatives back home.

Two months ago, Maria Eugenia Rodriguez, a dentist and mother of two, began shopping online for products such as powdered milk, sugar and bread.

“I buy Splenda from Amazon,” she said, referring to the online retailer. “Every few weeks I get a box full of staples from a courier in the States that arrives to the door of my house.”

In Caracas, shopping lines have grown so long that they have created ecosystems of commerce. Outside the Plan Suarez government supermarket in Caracas, vendors sold cigarettes and lemonade out of rusty shopping carts one recent day to the hundreds who had lined up. To cut down on crowds, officials allow in each day only people with certain numbers on their national identification cards.

“We’re waiting without even knowing what they will bring today, or if they’ll bring anything,” Yorilei Ramos, 51, said as she stood alongside her 9-year-old daughter. “Your kids are crying, ‘I’m hungry,’ and you have to tell them, ‘I have nothing.’”

Read More

Salad Preparation Made Simple

Read More

Brexit is not just Europe’s problem. It highlights a crisis in democracies worldwide.

By Dan Balz, Washington Post, June 27, 2016

LONDON–Britain’s political system remained in turmoil Monday, virtually leaderless and with the two major parties divided internally. But the meltdown that has taken place in the days after voters decided to break the country’s ties with Europe is more than a British problem, reflecting an erosion in public confidence that afflicts democracies around the world.

Last Thursday’s Brexit vote cast a bright light on the degree to which the effects of globalization and the impact of immigration, along with decades of overpromises and under-delivery by political leaders, have undermined the ability of those officials to lead. This collapse of confidence has created what amounts to a crisis in governing for which there seems no easy or quick answer.

The debris here is clear. The Brexit vote claimed Prime Minister David Cameron as its first victim. Having called the referendum and led the campaign to keep Britain in the European Union, he announced his intention to resign the morning after the vote. The results also now threaten the standing of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who faces a likely leadership election after seeing more than two dozen members of his leadership team resign in the past two days.

Alastair Darling, a former chancellor of the exchequer, outlined the extent of the crisis here during an interview with the BBC’s “Today” program on Monday. “There is no government. There is no opposition. The people who got us into this mess–they’ve gone to ground,” he said “How has the United Kingdom come to this position? We have taken this decision and have no plan for the future.”

The seeds of what has brought Britain to this moment exist elsewhere, which makes this country’s problems the concern of leaders elsewhere. In Belgium and Brazil, democracies have faced crises of legitimacy; in Spain and France, elected leaders have been hobbled by their own unpopularity; even in Japan, where Prime Minister Shinzo Abe faces no threat from the opposition, his government has demonstrated a consistent inability to deliver prosperity.

Anthony King, a professor of politics at the University of Essex, said the underlying factor is that many people no longer believe that, however imperfect things are economically, they will keep getting better.

In the face of that change in public attitudes, he said, much of the political class “is behaving the way it used to behave, the old arguments, the old fights, the adversarialism.” That has created what he called “the palpable disconnection” between political leaders and ordinary people. “That is true across much of the democratic world,” he added. “How do you put that right?”

The problem is especially acute here at the moment and threatens to grow worse in the near term. A longtime analyst of politics here, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of his position, said: “If you thought your [American] politics were a mess, we can outdo you any time. I’ve never known it in any way, shape or form as bad as this.”

Read More

Heaven over hospital: A tea party to say goodbye to Julianna Snow

By Elizabeth Cohen, CNN, June 21, 2016

It was a funeral with a dress code: fabulous.

And so friends and family arrived Saturday morning at City Bible Church in Vancouver, Washington, in floral print dresses and shocking pink polo shirts, brightly colored boas and sparkly bolero ties to celebrate the life of Julianna Yuri Snow.

Julianna, who had an incurable neuromuscular disorder, chose heaven over the hospital, and last week, she died, going to heaven on her own terms.

Her choice to forgo medical interventions at the end of her life was made with the blessings of her physicians and nurses at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland.

“We pulled her from death’s door so many times last year, but she’s sicker now than she was then, and I don’t think we could pull her through another big crisis,” one of her intensive care unit nurses, Diana Scolaro, said last fall.

“She doesn’t have a long time to live,” her pulmonologist, Dr. Danny Hsia, added at the time. “For her, there is no light at the end of the tunnel.”

During her life, Julianna’s story became known to millions and sparked a conversation about the role children should play in making their own end-of-life medical decisions.

And in death, she had a funeral that fit her magnificent, sparkly, princess self.

She couldn’t use her arms or legs or breathe or eat on her own, but Julianna didn’t know that her life should be anything but fabulous.

Every morning, she donned a princess dress and tiara. She dreamed up elaborate make-believe games with her dolls and animals. She insisted on polished nails and asked to have glitter spilled on her fingers.

“There’s no such thing as too much [glitter],” she told me during a visit with her last fall.

And she loved tea parties.

So her parents–Dr. Michelle Moon, a neurologist, and Steve Snow, a former Air Force fighter pilot–hosted a tea party instead of a traditional funeral.

Julianna’s funeral was everything she loved: bright colors, painted nails and tea parties.

“It will be big, elegant, colorful, fun, whimsical, loving, bright, joyful, magnificent,” Moon wrote on her blog last week after Julianna’s death.

“I’m hoping it’s an over the top, joyful explosion that brings people together to have fun and enjoy. That’s what she loved to do, and what she was so good at facilitating,” she added in an email to CNN. “We want to make J proud.”

When family and friends arrived at the church, pink balloons greeted them, along with a pink poster made by her grandfather Tom Snow.

“Text from Julianna: Arrived in heaven! I am healed! Thank you for your love! Hope to see you in God’s time,” the poster read.

To the right was a table full of Julianna’s toys, the tiny dolls and Hello Kitty figurines and ponies with long pink tails and bunnies and bears and mice that populated the stories she made up.

Children were welcome to take her toys home.

Next to the toys, a long table held tea sandwiches–cucumber and mint, tuna salad, peanut butter and jelly–but not egg salad, because Julianna thought egg salad was “stinky.”

Another long table held tea party sweets like scones and her grandmother’s peppermint cookies.

In the back of the church, friends and family frosted and decorated cupcakes at one station and painted their nails at another.

Julianna loved to paint her nails bright colors, and so family and friends painted their nails to celebrate her life.

Wood carvings of bunnies and teapots, made by her grandfather, decorated the walls. He also made bright pink easels to hold family photos. Signs for the food and nail and cupcake bars were written out in fancy handwriting and glitter by Moon’s cousins.

A family video and Julianna’s favorite song–Carrie Underwood’s version of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”–played in the background.

“Julianna cared about the details, so there [are] a lot of details here,” Moon wrote.

It was a funeral on Julianna’s terms.

Looking back, the Sunday before Julianna’s death was “a gift,” Moon says.

She and Julianna dyed a Barbie’s hair rainbow colors and made flowers out of pencils and fabric.

It was sunny and warm, and they took Julianna outside. Moon said she felt that she could relax and enjoy the moments with Julianna and her brother, Alex, 7.

Later in the afternoon, one of Julianna’s favorite hospice nurses, Juliah Larson, came by for a visit.

Then, late Sunday night, Julianna started to have trouble breathing. Respecting her wishes, her parents made her as comfortable as possible but did not take her to the hospital.

And she slipped in one last fashion observation to her mother, who never dressed quite as fabulously as Julianna would have liked.

“I was wearing a plain gray sweater that she hadn’t seen before,” her mother said. “She said, ‘What’s that?’ which is Julianna code for ‘You can do better than that.’”

In the early morning hours of June 14, Julianna passed away.

“She died at home, in her princess room and in my arms,” Moon said. “She died exactly where she wanted to die.”

“She went after 18 beautiful months [in hospice]. She didn’t go after a year of horrible hospitalizations,” she added.

“I take comfort knowing that it happened in the way she wanted it to happen.”

Now, they’re focused on raising money to fight the disease Julianna had, Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, through a book she wrote and a fundraising page.

Julianna’s parents say one of the things they learned from the last year and a half of her life is that priorities matter.

Before, their priority had been treating her illness.

But “it became abundantly clear that there was nothing we could do to save her from her disease,” Snow said in a speech at the funeral.

After that, Julianna still received care, such as treatments to make breathing easier, but the family’s priorities shifted.

“We didn’t stop doing medical stuff–we did a lot of medical stuff–but it wasn’t our focus. But it was in the background,” Moon said. “Instead, we made things she loved the priority. That really helped her thrive and helped us enjoy our time with her.”

Julianna thrived during this time, her parents say, with her nail polish and crafts and stories and jokes.

“We got to enjoy and love on Julianna, and her spirit and imagination thrived because of that love. We got to share her love with the world,” her father said.

Moon and Snow said they hope Julianna’s legacy is that unconditional love and joy.

“The power of love–it really is so powerful,” Snow said. “From love, you can have faith; you can have hope; you can have peace.”

Or, to quote Julianna, “Love is a superpower. It makes the bad guys good.”

Read More

5-Year-Old Julianna Snow Dies On Her Terms on CNN Breaking News

Read More

Final Distribution Event

Read More

Britain Rattles Postwar Order and Its Place as Pillar of Stability

By Jim Yardley, Alison Smale, Jane Perlez and Ben Hubbard, NY Times, June 25, 2016:

LONDON–Britain’s historic vote to leave the European Union is already threatening to unravel a democratic bloc of nations that has coexisted peacefully together for decades. But it is also generating uncertainty about an even bigger issue: Is the post-1945 order imposed on the world by the United States and its allies unraveling, too?

Britain’s choice to retreat into what some critics of the vote suggest is a “Little England” status is just one among many loosely linked developments suggesting the potential for a reordering of power, economic relationships, borders and ideologies around the globe.

Slow economic growth has undercut confidence in traditional liberal economics, especially in the face of the dislocations caused by trade and surging immigration. Populism has sprouted throughout the West. Borders in the Middle East are being erased amid a rise in sectarianism. China is growing more assertive and Russia more adventurous. Refugees from poor and war-torn places are crossing land and sea in record numbers to get to the better lives shown to them by modern communications.

Accompanied by an upending of politics and middle-class assumptions in both the developed and the developing worlds, these forces are combining as never before to challenge the Western institutions and alliances that were established after World War II and that have largely held global sway ever since.

Britain has been a pillar in that order, as well as a beneficiary. It has an important (some would argue outsize) place in the United Nations, and a role in NATO, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank–the postwar institutions invested with promoting global peace, security and economic prosperity.

Now Britain symbolizes the cracks in that postwar foundation. Its leaving the European Union weakens a bloc that is the world’s biggest single market, as well as an anchor of global democracy. It also undermines the postwar consensus that alliances among nations are essential in maintaining stability and in diluting the nationalism that once plunged Europe into bloody conflict–even as nationalism is surging again.

“It’s not that this, in and of itself, will completely destroy the international order,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a former American representative to NATO who is now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “But it sets a precedent. It is potentially corrosive.”

The symbolism was pointed in China on Saturday morning, two days after the British vote. In the packed ballroom of a Beijing hotel, China’s new international development bank held its first meeting of the 57 countries that have signed up as members. The new institution, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, is designed to give China a chance to win influence away from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

“History has never set any precedent,” the new bank’s president, Jin Liqun, once wrote of the United States and its Western allies, “that an empire is capable of governing the world forever.”

Even as European leaders held a flurry of meetings on Saturday to weigh a response to Britain’s departure, President Xi Jinping of China welcomed President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to Beijing for a brief state visit. More than China, Russia is an outlier to the American-led international system, and Mr. Putin–at best a wary partner of China, which itself has severe economic challenges–in recent years has worked to divide and destabilize Europe.

Mr. Putin has troubles of his own, including an economy hurt by low oil prices, that could limit his ability to exploit the moment. Still, for him, analysts say, the British vote is an unexpected gift.

Russia has nurtured discord inside the European Union by supporting an array of small, extremist political parties that foment nationalist anger in different countries. Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and meddling in eastern Ukraine directly challenged the rules-based international system of respecting national borders and led to a continuing political confrontation with the United States and Europe.

“Vladimir Putin will be rubbing his hands in glee,” the British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The Guardian.

The end of Pax Americana is not a new theme. Predictions of American decline were rampant after the global economic crisis in 2007 and 2008, amid parallel predictions of the dawning of a new Chinese century.

But the American economy steadily recovered, if imperfectly, while China has unnerved many of its Asian neighbors with a newly aggressive foreign policy. Chinese overreach opened a path for renewed American engagement in Asia, the fastest-growing region in the world, as President Obama called for a “pivot” to Asia.

Analysts disagree on whether this pivot signaled a declining American interest in European affairs and contributed to the Continent’s current problems. Part of the Obama administration’s rationale was to extricate the United States from decades of costly involvement in the Middle East at a time when that region was in upheaval.

There, the breakdown of the postwar political order has been more fundamental and violent than in Europe. The uprisings of the Arab Spring erupted from widespread frustrations with stagnant, autocratic politics and economic lethargy. But these rebellions failed to yield stable governments, and the borders drawn by Europeans a century ago in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq have been rendered largely irrelevant.

The nationalism surging in Europe is not the problem in the Arab world; rather, populations have retreated into greater reliance on sects, ethnic groups and militias. Jihadist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have fought national armies and won, providing a religious alternative to the nation-state that has been embraced by some.

Bassel Salloukh, an associate professor of political science at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, said the problems in the Middle East and Europe shared a common origin in the anxieties caused by tectonic shifts in the global economy. But while fear and frustration in the West have shown themselves through democratic elections, brittle Arab states lacked the flexibility to respond.

“Here, we have hyper-centralized, homogeneous, authoritarian states which, when facing these transformations, just exploded,” Mr. Salloukh said.

And those explosions were not contained within the Middle East. Refugees have poured out of Syria and Iraq. Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon have absorbed several million refugees. But it is the flow of people into the European Union that has had the greatest geopolitical impact, and helped to precipitate the British vote. Stabilizing Syria and permanently curbing the refugee flow could be one of the critical factors in determining whether Europe can steady itself politically.

Before the refugee crisis, the European Union was already an unwieldy and unfinished entity. Its contradictions and imperfections were exacerbated by the economic crisis. Yet it was the onset of more than a million refugees marching through Greece and the Balkans toward Germany that may ultimately prove to be the most destabilizing event in Europe’s recent history.

European countries erected border fences despite the bloc’s system of open internal borders. Populist parties raged against immigrants. Britain was relatively insulated, yet British politicians campaigning to leave the European Union depicted an island under siege, mixing the very different issue of immigration from other European Union states with the perceived threat from an influx of poor Muslims. This anti-immigrant strain twinned with the economic anxieties of many Britons who felt left out of the global economy to drive support for the country going its own way.

In the wake of Britain’s choice, Europe faces the parallel challenges of holding itself together and of retaining its global influence.

The European Union often frustrates American presidents, yet the disintegration of the bloc would be a geopolitical disaster for Washington. Even before Britain’s exit, Germany was Europe’s dominant power, and Chancellor Angela Merkel was Europe’s dominant leader.

“Britain leaving the E.U. now poses a challenge for Germany,” said Nicholas Burns, a former top American diplomat who now teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School. “It will need to provide even greater leadership to keep Europe united and moving forward.”

Germany, though, has been reluctant to play a diplomatic and military role commensurate with its economic heft. Ever mindful of its Nazi past, and its four decades as a divided country, Germany often wraps its policies in the mantle of Europe and has developed a pacifist instinct that is a poor fit with the expectations that it must now lead.

“There is no point beating about the bush,” Ms. Merkel said Friday. Europe has reached “a turning point,” and “more and more often, we encounter basic doubts” about ever-greater union.

The markers of European decline are not hard to find. For the first time in modern history, Asia has more private wealth than Europe, the Boston Consulting Group said last year. And China will account for 70 percent of Asia’s growth between now and 2019, the group said.

China’s development of its own international bank partly derives from its frustrations over its role in the I.M.F. Policy makers in Beijing were infuriated that they were not granted a bigger share of power at the I.M.F. as a show of gratitude for helping stabilize world economies in 2008.

Many Asian leaders have tended to view the European experiment at unity as a proposition that could not last. Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, once called the European Union a motley crowd trying to march to a single drummer. He predicted it would fail.

Read More

Preparation for 2nd Event

Read More

4 Soft Skills You Need To Work On, And Why

David Sturt and Todd Nordstrom, Forbes, June 23, 2016

Would you rather have a co-worker or manager who’s a leader in your field, a true expert with great amounts of knowledge and experience–but isn’t much of a people person, and doesn’t get along with the team very well? Or would you rather work side by side with an inexperienced colleague or leader who’s collaborative, curious, friendly, and pleasant? For most people, the answer is a no-brainer: “Give me someone I can work with! The knowledge and skills will come.”

The good news is, if you think you fall into the first category (lots of smarts and experience, but a lack of people skills), you can turn that around. We’ve found four soft skills you need to make people feel at ease and help them trust you at work–and, by the way, you’ll be making more friends, boosting your productivity, and innovating in no time.

Listening. “Listen first, talk later.” “One of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what another has to say.” “You learn when you listen.” If you’ve heard these–or any other of the myriad of quotes–about listening, you may grasp the importance of this skill. But, if you’re the type of person who finds themselves anxiously planning what you’ll say while others speak, you definitely should understand how important it is to just stop and listen. When a co-worker is communicating with you, give them your full attention. Put your phone down. Make eye contact. Respond only after you’ve heard everything they want to say. When you start making listening a priority, you may just see a lot of previous problems disappear–because listening carefully develops your empathy and understanding in any situation.

Nonverbal Communication. As a leader, your communication style sets the tone for the team. It’s important to be clear, concise, and respectful when you speak or write emails, but your nonverbal cues are another crucial part of good communication. Facial expressions, posture, gestures, and eye contact all count–and they say a lot. Make sure to be positive, polite, and respectful in your face-to-face interactions at work. Because when your body language conflicts with your words, people will believe your nonverbal cues, says Darlene Price, author of Well Said! Presentations and Conversations That Get Results. So keep the eye rolling and crossed arms to a minimum, lest you come across as disinterested and rude.

Dealing With Change. You know the only constant is change–so why is it so hard to manage when something suddenly shifts at work? Whether it’s a team member leaving or arriving, a change in direction, or even a new office space, change can be tricky to navigate. Our top tips? Keep your head. Ask questions so you understand the situation. Enlist help from friends and colleagues when you feel overwhelmed. And be patient, because adjusting to a new situation will probably take a little time.

Saying Thank You. Saying thank you really matters. When you reach out to a team member, a colleague, or even your boss (they deserve a thank you, too!) to appreciate their effort or big win, you’re projecting more than just professionalism. You’re also communicating kindness and team spirit–and boosting co-workers’ motivation to innovate and make a difference. The team grows stronger, people are happier and more satisfied with their jobs, and the whole company benefits. It’s a win-win-win. So if you don’t say thank you nearly enough–and most people don’t, research shows–use these best practices to work more appreciation into your work life.

Hard skills might be what get you the job–but soft skills are what drive friendship, success and happiness at work. So brush up on these simple but crucial people skills to boost your professional success. And don’t be surprised if they help your life outside work either!

Read More

Scientists Are Abuzz About Insect Intelligence

By Dan Nosowitz, Atlas Obscura, June 23, 2016

You kind of know, going into it, that scientists who have spent their lives studying animal behavior are not going to love being asked, “What is the smartest bug?”

“It’s a tricky question and I don’t think anyone will give you a straight answer to it, unfortunately,” laughs Marc Srour, a biologist who specializes in invertebrates. He’s being nice: it is, I fully acknowledge, a pretty stupid question. But scientists themselves have, without using that phrasing, been attempting to answer it, and have been making progress. Insect intelligence is an under-studied field, but a particularly weird and dynamic one where huge discoveries are being made almost every year.

The biggest problem with asking about animal intelligence is defining what we even mean by “intelligence.” The animals generally thought of as smartest–among them the great apes, dolphins, and the octopus–are believed to be intelligent because they demonstrate some of the behaviors that we associate with our own superiority as humans. These qualities include problem solving, advanced communication, social skills, adaptability, and memory, and also physical traits like the comparative size of the brain or number of neurons in the brain.

Insects are a particularly difficult group of animals to study for these traits, because they’re just so different from us. Srour walked me through the basics of an insect’s brain, and they are so weird. Insects are extremely modular creatures, not like us at all: the easiest way to understand an insect’s nervous system is that an insect has many different sub-brains in different parts of its body, which feed into and can be controlled by a slightly larger central brain but can actually also operate separately. The antennae of an insect has its own brain. So does the mouth, the eyes, and each leg. Even if the central brain of an insect stops working, its legs still have their own sub-brains, and can keep walking.

Insects have, even considering their small size, a comparatively smaller central brain than we do, and with a much, much smaller neural count. Lars Chittka, perhaps the foremost researcher on the behavior of bees, told me that a bee has under a million neurons in its main brain. Humans? About a hundred billion.

Whether the amount of neurons or the physical size of the brain is related to intelligence is not really clear; researchers have no idea what humans are doing with all those neurons. But certainly there is a correlation between comparative brain size and the amount of those “intelligent” behaviors an animal can perform.

There’s another angle as well, one that’s a little more complicated than just “big brain equals big smarts.” “Generalist insects tend to be the most intelligent,” says Srour. What he means is that insects, and animals in general, demonstrate more intelligence when they are equipped to adapt to all kinds of food sources and habitats. An animal that only eats one kind of leaf in one kind of tree doesn’t have to know very much; it can ignore all other information besides that which is directly related to that one leaf. “You can say in general that fleas and ticks, they’re not very intelligent,” says Srour. “They only have one purpose in life, and that’s to find their host and feed on their blood. They don’t have to do anything sophisticated so they don’t need very high brain functions.”

But a generalist animal has to do all kinds of intense thought to survive. Everything it sees can be a potential home, threat, or food source, and the animal has to constantly evaluate new stimuli to see if it can make use of it. A bee can feed on dozens of kinds of flowers, and must figure out the best bang for its buck as well as figuring out how to take advantage of it. The same goes for ants, which can feed on a wide variety of plant and animal matter. Ants leave scent trails for other ants to follow, a clear demonstration of social intelligence. Beetles don’t do that kind of thing; a beetle is a lone creature that doesn’t need to work with others for survival.

This all ties in with the “social brain hypothesis,” a theory put forth by anthropologist Robin Dunbar in 1998. The social brain hypothesis is basically that living in a group forces an individual to become smarter, rather than a smart individual choosing to live in a group.

“Ants, bees, and termites all have very high intelligence,” says Srour. “They have to recognize nest mates, communicate with them often.” The challenges of living within a large community require intelligence.

Unlike most insects, the honey bee is a social animal, which forces it to have many intelligent abilities that non-social insects (like, say, flies, or beetles) don’t need. And its smarts are legion: the insects are able to recognize and distinguish between human faces, a surprising trait given that it isn’t really necessary for their survival. Another one: bees can count. In an experiment, honey bees were rewarded for stopping at the third in a series of landmarks, and proved able to remember this location and to thus count. (The distance was altered, while keeping the same number of landmarks, to discourage the bees from using their sense of distance.) Further study indicated their maximum counting abilities go to about four.

Bees are capable of observation, learning, and memory to solve problems. “Every bee is entirely flower-naive at the beginning of its foraging career,” says Chittka, meaning that the bee has no instinctive knowledge about how to score nectar or pollen from flowers. That’s trouble, because flowers are wildly divergent: different flowers will need entirely different strategies to exploit, and it’s up to each individual bee to figure out how to attack each different flower.

Bees can learn new strategies for getting food from other bees, something few other insects are capable of doing. Chittka told me about a technique called “nectar robbing,” in which bees figure out that it can be easier to bite a hole in a flower’s spur to suck out the nectar rather than figuring out how to get inside the flower. Other bees have proven able to observe this strategy, understand its purpose, master it themselves, and remember it for future flowers. That’s pretty smart!

But perhaps the best-known and most insane bit of intelligence from bees is what’s known as the “waggle dance.” This is a method of communication that the bee uses to tell other bees in the hive the location of a flower or source of food. Here’s how it works: a bee performs the dance on a vertical surface inside the hive. The dance is shaped like a coffee bean: roughly, an oval with a line down the middle. Dancing straight up means to fly in the direction of the sun, straight down means away from the sun, and left and right mean to fly to the left or the right of the sun.

The bee travels in a figure-eight pattern, tracing the line in the middle before performing the loops around the outside of the coffee bean shape. The amount of time it takes the bee to make its circuit around the outside of the coffee bean tells other bees how far away the food source is: a one-second loop means, roughly, that the food source is a kilometer away. The longer the loop, the farther away the food source is.

The bee will repeat this dance many times to indicate the quality of the food source: a really great one will find the bee doing this over and over again, yelling “IT’S A KILOMETER NORTHWEST OF HERE, IT’S A KILOMETER NORTHWEST OF HERE, IT’S A KILOMETER NORTHWEST OF HERE” for minutes on end.

“The honey bee dance is unique insomuch as they’re using symbols,” says Chittka. “No other animal besides humans has that.” Even other primates don’t use symbols: an ape like a chimpanzee may point at a desired object, or lead others to it, but it won’t use an abstract symbol or message to indicate what it wants to convey. The honey bee’s waggle dance is a wildly intelligent attribute; it enables a bee to very efficiently convey detailed information to a large group, and also can be done in the safety of the hive, where other animals can’t overhear.

These behaviors are far above and beyond what most people would assume an insect is capable of. Without exaggerating, the honey bee is capable of advanced symbolic communication, language, facial recognition, number use, observation and mimicry, understanding of rules, and high-level problem-solving. They are, in some senses, significantly smarter than many mammals. Amazing.

Read More